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18 votes
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“Authentic” is dead. And so is “is dead.”
22 votes -
Pittsburgh smokers more inclined to say jagoff than yinz
21 votes -
Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture?
58 votes -
Thunderplump: Ten weird and wonderful words with Susie Dent
5 votes -
Grammagram
12 votes -
Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends-- finding more like this with NLP
23 votes -
How languages steal words from each other
10 votes -
Danish dictionary to weed out gender stereotypes – ‘career women’ are now paired with ‘career men’ and manslaughter is a linguistic offence
26 votes -
What's a word from another language that you wish was a thing in English?
I think Sitzpinkler from german is really cool. It literally means "sunday emptiness", and refers to a feeling of emptiness/boredom on a sunday afternoon. Edit: I meant sitzprinkler lol
66 votes -
The history of the boycott: How one Englishman’s name has ended up in every dictionary since 1888
8 votes -
Ox
8 votes -
The long history of the figurative 'literally'—and eight great writers who used it
2 votes -
Anglish: English without the 'foreign' bits
6 votes -
The year woke broke: A brief history of a contested word
2 votes -
The etymologies of military ranks
7 votes -
Interesting histories: Female — Male — Woman — Man
6 votes -
New gender-neutral pronoun is likely to enter the official Norwegian language within a year, the Language Council of Norway has confirmed
17 votes -
What words would you want to see 'reclaimed'?
Reclaiming a word means stripping it of it's negative baggage and giving it either a neutral or positive meaning. The most common example is the word Queer going from a slur to a descriptive term...
Reclaiming a word means stripping it of it's negative baggage and giving it either a neutral or positive meaning. The most common example is the word Queer going from a slur to a descriptive term for non cis-het people.
My personal pick would be returning the term "incel" to it's original meaning of "involuntary/involuntarily celibate" or someone who wants a relationship but doesn't have one, because the word is currently associated with the few tens of thousands of extremists who occasionally commit terrorist attacks, consider the redistribution of women reasonable and created the black-pill, but the amount of men (and realistically also women) who would consider themselves as wanting a relationship but not having one is much higher than a hundred thousand violent extremists, and if they could all describe themselves as incels, I think that would help steer the conversation about wanting a partner and not having one away from the extremists and to the much more numerous pool of mostly young people, seemingly mostly men who just want a partner and can't have one and usually mostly just feel bad about it to varying intensities. It wouldn't completely detach the term from cringe online right tropes as a lot of the dudes who can be described as incels often tend to fuel the kind of "women aren't real"/"Girls don't exist on the internet" culture that makes complaining about dating so 'lame'. (As in, the default reply is "just do basic self-improvement it'll put you ahead of most people lol".)
Another term I would reclaim if I could is the Red-pill/Blue-pill dichotomy with becoming red-pilled either being a joke about some vaguely red pill used to transition or as a shorthand for adopting leftist beliefs, mainly because the creators of The Matrix were Trans women who intended the movie to have a strong Trans subtext, and red is usually a leftist color instead of a conservative one, so becoming red-pilled meaning becoming a leftist is more intuitive in most places.
13 votes -
From respair to cacklefart – the joy of reclaiming long-lost positive words
8 votes -
Why do multiple meanings of words so often map across languages
The English word 'crane' means a large bird or a giant lever-thing for moving heavy stuff. The Hungarian word 'daru' means both of the same things. English and Hungarian are about as unrelated as...
The English word 'crane' means a large bird or a giant lever-thing for moving heavy stuff. The Hungarian word 'daru' means both of the same things.
English and Hungarian are about as unrelated as languages get ... and yet, I keep bumping into parallels like that.
Thoughts, anyone?
14 votes -
Why we say "OK"
7 votes -
Samfundssind – A word buried in the history books helped Danes mobilise during the pandemic, flattening the curve and lifting community spirit
9 votes -
Abso-bloody-lutely: Expletive infixation
9 votes -
500-year-old manuscript contains earliest known use of the “F-word”
9 votes -
Swearing in the Woods
3 votes -
Merriam-Webster's Time Traveler: Words by year of appearance
6 votes -
Why do people say "Jesus H. Christ," and where did the "H" come from?
38 votes -
Why certain words are left out of our English Bibles
7 votes -
Dictionaries recently added more than 1,500 words. Here are some new entries.
7 votes -
The rise of the swear nerds
13 votes -
What these two French words can teach us about social change
3 votes -
Time Traveller by Merriam-Webster—Find out when a word was first used in print
9 votes -
How the English language became such a mess
11 votes -
A debate over the word for ‘grandmother’ in China exposes a linguistic and political rift
8 votes -
Unrelated languages often use same sounds for common objects and ideas, research finds
16 votes -
Color or fruit? On the unlikely etymology of "orange"
8 votes -
"Guy" should be a neutered term. Change my mind.
In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier? I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the...
In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?
I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:
- the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
- we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
- "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
- we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).
I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.
[EDIT]
I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.
generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]
Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.
That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.
42 votes